Category: Translation (Italian)

The Enduring Kiss: Seven Short Lessons On Love by Massimo Recalcati

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The Blurb On The Back:

The kiss is the image that, perhaps more than any other, encompasses the beauty and poetry of love.  Every love is required to maintain the kiss, to make it last.  When they kiss, the noise of the world is silenced, its laws broken, time is stolen from its normal continuity.  They fall together in their distinct, embraced tongues.  The kiss joins the tongue that declares love with the body of the lover.  And the extinction of the kiss and, most importantly, of the desire to kiss one’s beloved announces the demise of love.

In this short book, Massimo Recalcati – one of Italy’s leading intellectuals and bestselling authors – offers seven brief lessons on the mystery and miracle of love, from the serendipity of the first encounter to its end or its continuation over time, as mysterious and miraculous as the fist encounter itself.  

You can buy THE ENDURING KISS: SEVEN SHORT LESSONS ON LOVE by Massimo Recalcati from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

The Review (Cut For Spoilers):

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Primo Levi: The Last Interview – Conversations with Giovanni Tesio by Giovanni Tesio

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The Blurb On The Back:

At the start of 1987, Primo Levi took part in a remarkable series of conversations about his early life with a friend and fellow writer, Giovanni Tesio.  This book is the result of those meetings, originally intended to be the basis for an authorised biography and published here in English for the first time.

In a densely packed dialogue, Levi responds to Tesio’s tactful and never too insistent questions with a watchful readiness and candour, breaking through the reserve of the public persona to allow a more intimate self to emerge.  Following the thread of memory, he lucidly discusses his family, his childhood, his education during the Fascist period, his adolescent friendships, his reading, his shyness and his passion for mountaineering, and recounts his wartime experience as a partisan and the terrible price it exacted from him and his comrades.  Though we glimpse his later life as a writer, the story breaks off just before his deportation to Auschwitz due to his sudden death.

In The Last Interview, Levi the man, the witness, the chemist and the writer all unite to offer us a story which is also a window onto history.  These conversations shed new light on Levi’s life and will appeal to the many readers of this most eloquent witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. 

You can order Primo Levi: The Last Interview – Conversations with Giovanni Tesio by Giovanni Tesio from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

The Review (Cut For Spoilers):

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